What’s your house worth?

One of the services I offer to my Sellers and Buyers (when purchasing) is evaluating market value of the property. How do you do that? I’m going to showcase how I evaluate properties when listing them for sale and hopefully this will help you when you’re ready to sell your house!

It’s imperative to have an optimum list price when selling a property. If the market evaluation is not correct, a property stands to stay on the market for a long time without selling. This leads to two issues:

An unhappy Seller who’s expectations are not fulfilled
A property that took effort and resources (including expense) that didn’t sell

How do you over come this?

Well, most of the industry when conducting a market evaluation use the recent sold properties to come up with market value of a property. This is used as the basis to come up with a list price for the property. I like taking it a step further. Following are the different factors I consider when listing a property and recommending a list price:

Timing
Demand
Competition
What not to do!

It’s a good practice to evaluate what time frame is the Seller looking to make their move in. This comes from having a detailed discovery of the needs of the seller and to come up with a schedule of events that need to be followed. Point worth nothing is that nothing is definitive and can’t be too stringent. One needs to have some leaway to ensure no false expectations are being set. Afterall, we’re marketing a property and need to find the right buyer to buy the house! Take a look at what the days on market are for properties that have sold or are currently sold conditional to understand the relationship of price and time on market.

It’s also a good practice to see how much recent demand is in the neighborhood and the type of property being listed. This can be achieved by looking at what has recently been sold conditional and when the last sale was. If the demand is high (lots of SOLD Conditional properties), it means that you will be able to sell your property pretty quickly. Also, use step 1 (timing) to gauge how quickly you will be able to sell your house and move on to your purchase (if applicable)

You also need to know what you’re competing against. Take a look at what other properties are listed at and how your property compares to them. If you’re not sure about a property, ask your REALTOR to take you on a tour of the house and take detailed notes to come up with a comparable value of your home compared to it.

After reviewing the above-mentioned, take a look at the expired listings in your area. This is what you CAN’T list your property at.

If you follow these guidelines, you should be able to almost always come up with a competitive list price and even generate enough interest to get multiple offers and shoot your price over the list!!!

Hope this helps… Don’t forget to post any comments or questions you may have…

HAPPY SELLING!

The contributing factor,

Addy Saeed
Real Estate Sales Representative
Re/max Active Realty Inc., Brokerage
www.HeyAddy.com